BlockDevs Asia is Tier #1 Servi node—Q2 Summary

BlockDevs Asia wants to support blockchain builders with education and better tooling.

Also, we want to incubate the star builders and start to build competitive OnChain DApps.

What’s It All About

Every quarter, BlockDevs Asia reports about the work we have done with the IOST Foundation. Most of these happen behind closed doors. But we, as BlockDevs Asia, want to make this process more transparent and therefore we’d share all our work with the IOST Community and to anyone who is interested in a transparent and open manner.

We as BlockDevs Asia want to propose all nodes to collaborate and communicate with more people for Q3. We have been working on development tooling which we’ve seen others have also worked on. Let’s collaborate more and share our code in an open and transparent fashion!

BlockDevs Q1 Summary

Platform hands-on: IOST event by BlockDevs

Earlier this year, an event called Platform hands-on: IOST was held on January 26 from 1PM to 5PM. The event was a technology demo by IOST with CTO Terrence Wang. The event also provided hands-on experimentation for blockchain developers to help them discover the latest blockchain technology being developed this year.

BlockDevs Q2 Summary

EVENT: The Inclusive Prosperity Fintech Summit—a 2-day event

The Fintech Summit was a blockchain event held in Manila that composed of two events—the Dish 2019 and the Fintech Forum.

As posted on their website, Dish 2019 is a “Blockchain hackathon in Metro Manila Philippines is a startup challenge that aims to enable Metro-Manila based developers to prototype and build relevant and sustainable platforms using blockchain technology.

The purpose of the event is stated as:“towards the goal of promoting blockchain use case design and engineering skill awareness for potential local talent that will hopefully culminate in a wider hiring pool for participating blockchain companies.”

The Fintech Forum, on the other hand, is “a series of conferences and exhibitions, primarily focused on the inclusive prosperity of financial technology. The event will ensure networking and meeting other innovators in the field.”

During the event, BlockDevs covered important blockchain topics such as ICO’s, payments, borderless money, and alternative finance. The blockchain community is still in its early stages, and the event is said to help educated and house in developers and individuals who have interests with blockchain and to help it tap into the multiple potentials the technology unknowingly contains.

An Invitation to DISH 2019

DISH Blockchain Hackathon Promo Video

The event was posted on MeetUp. The event was held on Saturday, April 6, 2019, 7:00 AM to Sunday, April 7, 2019, 6:00 PM at Acceler8 by UnionSPACE Legazpi, 111 Paseo de Roxas, Makati.

The invitation for the said event invited students, developers and teams to join the development event and win prizes. The invitation also welcomed volunteers and spectators as the blockchain community is still relatively small. But it was truly an event full of education, games, prizes for blockchain developers.

While the website showed a confirmed 40+ attendees, the actual event held up to at least 70 attendances.

The Day of the Event

A whole account of the event was posted by BlockDevs here. The event had 75 participants, 10 mentors, and 12 judges for the blockchain development event. Here is a timetable that shows the schedule of events.

Day 1

Time

Event

Person/s Related

9:00 AM – 11:00AM

Introduction to BlockchainIntroduction to mentors

Caspar Oostendorp

11:00AM – 5:00PM

Blockchain application development

Participants and Mentors

During day 1, the mentors were separated into different teams. And it was reported that most participants had no idea when it came to blockchain development. However, the mentors stayed and guided them with hands-on help to make sure they are on the right track. Some mentors even stayed until midnight to make sure the teams can work on their blockchain project without much difficulty

Day 2

Time

Event

Person/s Related

9:00 AM – 11:00AM

Continuation of blockchain application development

Participants and Mentors

1:00PM – 4:00PM

Elimination Round

Participants and Judges

4:00PM – 6:00PM

Project PitchingResults of Winners

ParticipantsParticipants and Judges

The top 3 winners used EOS and IOST platforms, while others used Stellar, NEM, and Eteruem. Special awards were also given to some teams.

Seven Seven A, Third Place

Team Ernest Project, Second Place

First Place: Gigamike Project – ProsperEOS

Second Place: Team Ernest Project – iSchool

Third Place: SevenSeven A Project – InforMefy

Outstanding Technical: Cadet Corpse Project – CryptoMons

Outstanding Commercial: Flexicoin Project – Coinscious Juan

Outstanding Societal: Team Horton Project – PataTask for Kids

What the Participants Had to Say

Some of the winners postedblogs and the BlockDevs website to recap the event, give tips to future participants, and to thank the organizers in helping them as newcomers into adept blockchain developers.

Participant Aviv Guese said that they started as mere amateurs before the event. But they ended up with more than enough knowledge about blockchain

“Our team is composed of three blockchain trainees and two senior java developers from our company. We are the pioneer batch of trainees to undergo training to become blockchain developers but as this technology is new even to the senior developers at our company, our understanding of this technology is still superficial.

We are only halfway through our training and we are working our way up from Java to Blockchain to ease us into the new technology. Little did we know that we’d dive right into #DISH2019, totally unprepared and with only partial knowledge about the craft.”

2nd Place winner Ernest Pascual had this to say about the event:

“The tech space evolves fast so we must also quickly adapt to these changes. Hackathons are a great way of validating what you learn and show proof of concept to potential clients, employers, and investors (aside from winning the top prize, lol).”

The Fintech Forum

The Fintech Forum was held at the same time. The event also happened during Saturday, April 6-April 7 from 9:00AM to 5:00 PM at Acceler8 by UnionSPACE Legazpi, 111 Paseo de Roxas, Makati. This was done in collaboration with multiple partners such as UnionBank, Oost & Voort Inc, Acceler8, and EOI Digital with sponsorships from Token News, Aizen, HB Wallet, and Asia Blockchain Review.

The Fintech Forum had over 26 speakers which were CEOs, experts, and senior managers from different companies. These experts were part of companies who are looking into integrating blockchain to make it useful for social and financial purposes.

The event also had multiple booths and networking sessions to help participants with the current blockchain news and updates.

One the first day, the event mainly had multiple sessions from individual speakers. And on the second day, there was a continuation of the forum in the morning. In the afternoon, the audience were given a chance to make network and allow business leaders and potential investors with their ideas and pitches.

Takeaways from DISH 2019 and Fintech Forum

While there was a lot to learn from both DISH and Fintech Forum, we highlighted one takeaway from the event. During Q1, Terrence Wang held a demo for IOST and allowed participants to get hands-on help with the new technology. During DISH 2019, multiple participants also opted to use IOST compared to other platforms for many reasons.

“IOST stands for Internet of Services Token and is a decentralized platform based on blockchain, which means it is secure and scalable. It makes use of the proof of Believability (POB) consensus mechanism, Efficient Distributed Sharding (EDS) technology and ultra-high 100.000 Transaction per second (TPS) which is what makes it unique in its scalability. This is what makes the IOST blockchain memorable and different from the rest.”

The DISH 2019 event allowed theoretical and up-and-coming blockchain tech to actually be put into good use. This is what we aim during our events. Blockchain technology and development is still nascent, and the best way to make it work is to have more and more people come and help the community grow through actual application and use.

We are halfway through 2019 and so far both events have been successful. We hope and expect that more people come and help the world of blockchain grow into a bigger community. In that way, we can make this technology flourish and be put into good use.

EVENT: Smart Contract Platforms Today: Looking Beyond Ethereum

Another event held in Q2 was “Looking Beyond Ethereum”. This event was held in order to look into how smart contracts have been developed and changed since it was headlines in 2014.

Caspara Oostendorp was also part of the event and he said that “Ethereum is the most decentralized and most adopted smart contract platform. Though it was not built for high throughput dApps, it’s perfect for ensuring immutability across the broadest distribution of full nodes,”

Amadeo Brands was also a speaker during the event where he introduced IOST to the audience. He proposed that IOST “has a higher throughput compared to Ethereum, is more developer friendly, and provides a faster virtual machine.”

KiJun Sung and MinJee Kim, senior manager and manager from Ground X, were speakers of the event. They introduced Klatyn to the audience and its possible applications with the use of blockchain

The speakers were Chris Verceles, KiJun Sung, Minjee Kim, and Amadeo Brands. Click here for more information about them.

Important Events in Singapore from Q2

BlockDevs Asia was also a partner forThe National Blockchain Challenge 2019 held in Singapore last May-June. This event is “connects institutional, academic, developer and student communities. We encourage teams to build blockchain applications that can result in fairer, more equitable, empowered and prosperous work of the future.”

Last June 8 at Singapore University, BlockDevs Asia also held an event called Presents_IOST where they ”covered perspectives in depth to what constitutes a public blockchain, who are involved, and the possibilities in the decentralized world. A seasoned technical representative will be covering a technical framework of the IOST blockchain, leading to a coding session to build a simple application on the blockchain.”

The schedule of events for Presents_IOST were as follows:

10:00 AM – 10:30PM — Registration Starts.

10:30 AM – 12:00 PM — Introduction to IOST.

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM — Lunch Break.

1:15 PM – 2:00 PM — Technical Framework Brief.

2:00 PM – 5:00 PM — Coding Workshop.

5:00 PM – 5:30 PM — Announcements and Networking.

Other Things

We also provided IOST Tooling here, here, and here. BlockDevs Asia wants to support builders with education and better tooling. Also, we want to incubate the star builders and start to build competing OnChain DApps.

We also put up a new website for BlockDevs Asia which can be found here.

What to Expect from Q3

We have more IOST events coming up for Q3. Not only do we expect more developers on board, but during Q3, we begin with our IOST incubator program where we turn adept blockchain developers into field experts. We have more IOST events for people who still want to catch up and join the blockchain train.

We will also hold another hackathon dedicated to IOST. And more importantly, we will put IOST into good use by applying it within an industry. An event for IOST Casino game development is in store. So this won’t be the last we will see of this new technology.

If there are any other node partners that want to partner with us or that needs our help, please reach out to us: [email protected]. We are looking forward to working with you soon!